


you’ve got blood on your hands and I know it’s mine

by cupcakeb



Category: Elite (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Carla finds Polo in the bathroom the night of graduation basically, F/M, completely follows canon aside from that... ending, this isn’t so much about them as a couple as it is just two people with too many regrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-13 05:27:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28773072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cupcakeb/pseuds/cupcakeb
Summary: The blue and white fabric of the shirt he’s wearing has a gaping red stain in the middle, and for just a second, Carla feels a sense of deja vu come over her. It hasn’t quite been a year since she saw him like this, covered in blood that definitely wasn’t his own.Carla feels oddly in control. She’s calm. Crises are her thing. She’ll deal with the resounding trauma later, just like last time.
Relationships: Carla Rosón Caleruega/Leopoldo "Polo" Benavent Villada
Comments: 6
Kudos: 38





	you’ve got blood on your hands and I know it’s mine

**Author's Note:**

> If you’re squeamish about blood references, this story isn’t for you, although nothing gets particularly gory.

  
It’s difficult to describe how Carla feels when she first catches sight of the droplets of blood. She’s tipsy, not drunk, and the second she spots the pattern of scarlet drying on the dirty, white tile floor of the club, her senses kick into gear.  
  
Not exactly how she saw this graduation party going, but she’s too concerned to look away.  
  
The VIP area is reasonably crowded, classmates and other familiar faces dancing and drinking and laughing to her left and her right, and really, it feels like a sign; how she looks straight ahead and the bloodied tile parts the sea of people. A little like Moses and the red sea, except she’s not quite a prophet, and really, it's Lu parting the crowd, walking towards Carla at an intimidating speed.   
  
Normally she’d write all of this off as random, but there’s a trail of the stuff, clearly leading back to the powder room and when she looks up again, Lu almost runs into her, clutching a bottle of champagne that has seen better days. It happens so quickly, she has no time to grab her and ask her why the fuck she looks like she’s seen a ghost. Lu’s makeup is a mess, so she’s been crying, and none of this is making any sense to Carla yet, but her gut feeling isn’t great.  
  
Lu flees the scene — or what Carla thinks might be a scene — and she can’t help but be pragmatic about things. Chances are the trail of blood will lead to a bathroom sink where she’ll find an angry teenage heartthrob tending to his battle wounds, punched in the face by a scorned lover. That’ll be it, and Carla will leave, and find another drink, then maybe her courage to speak to Samuel tonight.

It’s just a trickle of blood, anyway. It’s probably nothing. Hardly enough to justify freaking out about. Carla wills herself to keep walking.

Things don’t start feeling eerie and daunting until she rounds the corner to the powder room and realizes the little droplets have become drops, that there’s more where this came from. The blood leads to one of the large bathroom stalls, and even though this isn't the time to be thinking about it, she remembers the last time she was in here was with Samuel. All this is enough to creep her out a little. She’s good in a crisis, but this might be above her pay grade. There are many things Carla can fake; courage isn’t one of them.  
  
Taking a deep breath, she wills herself to stay calm. This might still not be what it looks like. It may still just be a kid with a bloody nose or a scraped knee. Sure, there's blood, but it's not crazy amounts of blood; it doesn't have to be anything out of the ordinary.  
  
There’s no point dragging this out further. She pulls the door open, then instantly finds herself crouching down to cradle Polo’s face in her hands when she spots him on the floor, his head propped up against the tile wall. It’s not what she was expecting to find, but she doesn’t let herself spiral into shock or show she’s overwhelmed — that isn’t going to help anyone now. She locks the door behind herself and takes him in.  
  
The blue and white fabric of the shirt he’s wearing has a gaping red stain in the middle, and for just a second, Carla feels a sense of deja vu come over her. It hasn’t quite been a year since she saw him like this, covered in blood that definitely wasn’t his own.  
  
“Polo.”  
  
He glances at her, his eyes almost shut in pain and maybe exhaustion, and she finds herself grabbing onto his chin, her other hand gently pushing at his cheek to get some sort of verbal response out of him.  
  
But he stays quiet. This probably isn’t the best time for them to catch up — they can talk later. Her fingers make quick work of the buttons on his shirt, slowing down only once she gets closer to what she’s assuming must be a pretty big wound.  
  
Once his chest is exposed, she breathes a sigh of relief. There are clear indents on his chest like he was stabbed, but none of the cuts look particularly deep, and none of them are gushing blood, so he’s going to be okay.  
  
He needs to be okay.  
  
It’s startling, how all-consuming that thought is now. After ignoring him for months on end, this still feels important. She feels responsible for him. Hell, he saved her fucking life just three weeks ago; she owes him. And no, his life isn’t on the line, but this still feels really fucking monumental.  
  
Sixteen seasons of Grey’s Anatomy have not accurately prepared her for this moment, but it’s what affirms her in her decision to jump to her feet now and grab the first aid kit. She knows it’s stored under the sinks out in the powder room because she cut her hand on a champagne flute here that one time.  
  
He should go to the hospital, probably, but first, she wants to get a closer look and see how bad this really is. When she sits back down next to him, she takes his hand in hers and searches his eyes for some sign that he knows she’s here, that he wants her help.  
  
This isn’t the time for one of his dramatic moments of self-pity — she needs to know how bad things actually are. He can be so lethargic sometimes. “Polo, talk to me.”  
  
He looks at her again, opens his eyes a little wider than before, then frowns. “Carla?”  
  
“You’re fine. It’s not too bad. Just stay still for me.” She points at his chest, pokes her finger into the muscle of his shoulder to get him to look at her properly. “I’m gonna clean this for you, okay?”  
  
That’s what they told her to do with cuts once, in a stupid mandatory school first aid course. At the time, she was convinced that the entire session was a waste of a day, but now she’s glad she seems to at least be remembering fragments of it.  
  
Silence, and then, “Okay.”  
  
This isn’t what she thought she’d spend her night doing. She uses one of the antibacterial wipes in the kit to clean around the cuts first, and things already look a lot less daunting once she gets most of the dried blood off.  
  
That leaves the part she’s dreading. She dabs some of the hydrogen peroxide onto a bit of cotton, then holds it onto the first cut without warning. It’s the smallest of them all, but Polo’s body still jerks forward, and he shifts so some of his weight is resting on her.  
  
The pain seems to have helped him find his words. “Hurts.”   
  
“I know. It’s going to hurt some more, okay?” She moves her hand to clean out the second cut. This one’s a little deeper. Polo winces, and Carla feels oddly in control. She’s calm. Crises are her thing. She’ll deal with the resounding trauma later, just like last time. ”Deep breaths. I’m sorry- I’m so sorry—”  
  
A guttural scream leaves his lips, muffled only by the way his head has come to rest on her shoulder. Fuck. She hates seeing him like this.  
  
A few dabs later, his chest looks far less terrifying, at least. She’s put bandaids on the cuts, a temporary fix, one he better get checked out by a real professional tomorrow. She’ll have to remind him.

But this isn’t what she’s worried about — the physical injury is surface-level at best, even though he lost a bit of blood. No, what worries her is the empty expression on his face, the resigned frown on his lips when she tells him, “There, you’re okay now.”  
  
Maybe he isn’t quite okay now.  
  
She sits back and rakes her eyes over him. There are a few spots of blood on his pants, but they’re easy to miss. His shirt is hanging off his shoulders, and he’s slumped back against the wall, his eyes staring off into the distance. His lower lip trembles and she’s held him through one too many panic attacks to not recognize the telltale sign. But this is worse; he looks completely removed from reality. It’s like he isn’t even really here.  
  
Maybe the panic attacks have gotten worse in the past twelve months.  
  
Maybe she did this to him. Maybe if she’d just let him go to the police last June, if she hadn’t come up with an elaborate cover story to hide the truth about Marina’s murder… Maybe he would be better now. In therapy, or maybe juvenile detention, at worst.  
  
A guilty conscience is worse than death — she read that in a book once, written by an acclaimed author who seemed almost as screwed up as Polo, sitting in front of her now like the broken little boy he is. The part of her that still loves him, the part of her that probably always will, wants to hug him until this passes.  
  
She knows Polo well enough to see how it’s still eating away at him now, after everything is all said and done. The truth still weighs on him. Even now that everyone knows, now that he’s been through public humiliation and bullying and has lost every last friend he had in this world, she sees regret written all over his face.  
  
Even at his lowest, he still regrets. It speaks to the kind of person he is.  
  
Polo moves his head just slightly to look at her, and she’s glad she’s the one who found him like this. She doesn’t want to think about what he might’ve done if she hadn’t.  
  
He’s always been unpredictable when his emotions get the best of him.  
  
“You can go now,” he says, dismissive, like none of this is even remotely out of the ordinary. “I know you don’t want to be here.”  
  
He doesn’t mean that. He shuts people out when he gets overwhelmed, and she’s not buying it. Maybe the others would — Cayetana, with her little savior complex, or Valerio, who idolizes Polo for the escape he provides.  
  
Escapism has never quite been Carla’s style.  
  
“What the fuck happened?” she asks instead because she'd like to know. She thinks she deserves to know.  
  
Polo scoffs, kind of mean. “Do you really want to know?”  
  
Instead of answering him, she cocks her brow expertly, then fixes him with a look. He chuckles — it sounds off in the confines of the dimly lit bathroom, where the dull bass of generic Latin pop can be heard streaming through the door.  
  
“I’ve always hated how good you were at that.”  
  
“At what?”  
  
“Seeing me.”  
  
That answer is a little too honest for her liking. She doesn’t ask about the events that led to his wounded chest again. Instead, she takes his hand in hers, then moves so she’s sat next to him, their shoulders brushing.  
  
“You need help.”  
  
“So people keep saying.” His reply is instant. “And yet no one is willing to do the helping.”  
  
“Then you’ll have to help yourself. You’re fucking eighteen years old, Polo, grow up.”  
  
They all had to. It’s his fucking turn.  
  
He looks over at her and grins. “You sound like my mothers.”  
  
That’s a backhanded compliment if she’s ever heard one. His relationship with his parents is almost as strained as hers, though in an entirely different way. He’s always been a sensitive kid, someone who needed extra care, and his mothers have always preferred to pay professionals to provide it.  
  
“You’re full of shit.”  
  
“Don’t you have a party to get back to? Don’t let me keep you.”  
  
Carla looks at him, really looks at him for the first time in months, and feels overcome with regret. They really put each other through their paces.  
  
She kisses him, in a stupid impulsive moment, just quickly brushes his lips with her own. It’s over as soon as it starts, and they end up staring at each other.  
  
This feels like a mistake. But it also feels familiar, and familiarity is a rarity for her these days. She hasn’t felt that comfort in a very long time. All she knows is that she’s not a good person, and he’s not a good person either, but this, they’re great at. Fucking up, and hurting and finding themselves caught up in the aftermath.  
  
“We should go back out there.”  
  
Polo sighs, pointing at his shirt. “I think I’ll head home before people see me like this.”  
  
That’s wise. Carla reaches over, helps him with his buttons, then gets up and holds her hand out to him. When he’s standing right in front of her, she brushes some of the wrinkles out of his shirt and nods. The stain is glaringly obvious, but if he rushes through the crowd of drunk teenagers, no one will take notice.  
  
Polo puts a hand on her shoulder and sighs. “I told my mothers tonight.”  
  
She doesn’t need to ask what it is he told them. She just nods, then leans forward and hugs him. To her surprise, a sob wrecks through him, and then he’s weeping, tears dripping down her bare shoulder and back.  
  
Now he’s scaring her. It’s probably counter-intuitive, how seeing him covered in blood didn’t scare her as much as this does. When she pats his shoulder as she hugs him back, he just sobs even harder, and there’s absolutely no way she’s letting him leave like this. Not if what she heard through the school rumor mill was true. (Did he actually… Would he really— she doesn’t know, and she won’t ask, but it feels like he might.)  
  
“Come back to my place,” she says, even if it means sneaking him past her parents, and Mirella, and then back out tomorrow morning. Even if it means her original plans for the night are ruined — she can talk to Samuel tomorrow; she’s not leaving for the other side of the world for another week anyway.  
  
All of that pales in comparison to making sure Polo doesn’t fucking hurt himself any further than he already did tonight.  
  
Polo stops crying long enough to wipe at his eyes, then pulls back to face her and god, this she can’t take. He looks fucking broken, and she wants to know how to fix all his cracks.  
  
There’s no one at the club waiting for her, no one she needs to find and say goodbye to, and right now that feels like a blessing, not a testament to her loneliness. She takes Polo’s hand, then unlocks the stall door and leads him through the crowded dance floor, heading straight for the exit.  
  
She still has some of his clothes in her room. She realizes it when he’s sitting on her bed, still in his blood-streaked, ruined outfit and she steps into her closet to find him a shirt to wear. He shoots her a weary smile when she hands him one of his worn, cotton Las Encinas shirts and a pair of sweatpants he must’ve left here years ago.  
  
No one heard them come in, and if anyone asks her about it tomorrow, she won’t feel bad about lying. She has no issue with having her parents think she fucked her ex-boyfriend in a drunken, nostalgia-fueled fit after graduation. It’s preferable to them knowing the truth, anyway. They don't get to know anything about her life anymore.

Carla has never minded lying if it’s to protect the people she loves most in the world.

For a long time, they just lie there, under the covers, both of them wide awake but neither of them ready to speak. It feels like hours, but it’s probably only been minutes, and then she feels Polo shift, moving so he’s right behind her. He sneaks an arm around her waist carefully, like he’s afraid she might push him away, and she instantly covers his hand with her own to let him know she won’t.  
  
She holds him tight and doesn’t let go.

**Author's Note:**

> find me [on tumblr](http://cupcakeb.tumblr.com/)


End file.
